"The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that's difficult to access - to a level that's not material but spiritual. That's what poetry and music do, and that was the first calling of religion. Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, stop thinking and accept what I tell ( Read more... )

It's been forever and a day since I did anything even approaching a normal update. That is, not including a quote from somewhere or other, or vaguely mentioning something that's not really relevant beyond noting it for posterity.

So. What have I been up to?

( Blah blah essays blah )

It feels like a night for staying up, for watching to see if the sunrise is worth capturing on camera, talking and reading and idling the hours away. But travel and sleep pull at my body and for once I just don't want caffeine ( Read more... )

I should be writing an essay but instead I am just reading poetry, drenched in the sunshine.

In a lecture on irony yesterday, the lecturer first used an example from 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. She asked if we were familiar with the text, and a few cursory hands were raised. Her next example for analysis was 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning. She again asked if anyone was familiar with it. Three quarters of the lecture ( Read more... )

Today I found out that a girl I went to high school with has died. I wasn't particularly close to her, and probably best knew her in about 2000/2001, but I feel sad nonetheless. Her name was Gladys. I gather that she was sick for a long time, and that not many people knew about it. I only hope that her close friends and family are enduring. I don't ( Read more... )

Watching Obama's inauguration set my mind wandering back to London, to my A-level History classroom of two years ago, to Miss Richards and her scrutiny of African American civil rights from 1865 to 1980. I thought of her, small Welsh bundle of energy that she is, with friends or colleagues watching the historic moment. In the same way, during Obama ( Read more... )

"'I don't understand how you find the time to pursue so many things to a fairly geeky level.' To which I could only say I don't understand what everyone else does with their time."

"It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, call each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to ( Read more... )

I've changed the theme of my livejournal once again. Only, this time, I spent ages picking through the CSS document of one of the default themes, tweaking it here and there, changing font styles and sizes. Problem is, now I'm tempted to just keep on fiddling with it rather than being satisfied. As when I started teaching myself basic HTML, I found ( Read more... )